It depends if you need to do any intermediate processing on the recordset returned. If not, then derived table will be the best.

>is one way preferable over the other?
>
>
>>The first select does not create a table with name TranCodes but just a recordset that is not accessible from T-SQL. You can either create a temp table, put result into a table variable or use derived table as shown below
>>

>>SELECT *
>> 	FROM Transactions
>>	WHERE sTrans_Type_CD IN
>>		(SELECT DataItems FROM SELECT * FROM udfParseCommaListToTable(@sTransTypeCodes, ','))
>>